At the moment, I can see that Blender only exports to VRML 1.0, DXF and videoscape, and even with those they don't export well. If possible, could we get a better export and in other formats such as obj and 3ds?

I agree, particularily since I will be using the models from Blender to be used in other programs. If someone were wanting to make these models available to others to use in other programs it would be difficult at the moment.

Has anyone found a program that will take a blender model and convert it to dxf, 3ds or obj? Like jpg, bmp and gif of the imaging world these are the common formats of the 3D modeling world.

At the moment, the dxf export in Blender comes up with some errors that I can't seem to figure out why I'm getting them. When I try to import it in to various programs, such as Poser and Painter, I get an error message that reads that "This DXF file does not contain any facet entity data and hence no model was imported."

jesterKing wrote:Still I think it would be good to have Blender export 'natively' to a wide variety of formats.

Not sure I agree with that, the 'native' part that is. I think that if the scripting API is sufficiently flexible, then any exporter should be doable in script as a plugin. This would prove to be an excellent test of the scripting API as much as anything else.

I don't really have the time I'd like to be able to develope something around it. Maybe somebody else would like to pick the ball up and have a play with it. The library has all the functions we'd need:

Still I think it would be good to have Blender export 'natively' to a wide variety of formats.

Not sure I agree with that, the 'native' part that is. I think that if the scripting API is sufficiently flexible, then any exporter should be doable in script as a plugin. This would prove to be an excellent test of the scripting API as much as anything else.

When exporting a large model, no matter how extensible the scripting code, it is going to be SLOW. a model of a tank that took 45 seconds to render in blender and 15 seonds to save to a .blend took 16 HOURS to export to lightflow. What we need are compiled export plugins.

jesterKing wrote:Still I think it would be good to have Blender export 'natively' to a wide variety of formats.

Not sure I agree with that, the 'native' part that is. I think that if the scripting API is sufficiently flexible, then any exporter should be doable in script as a plugin. This would prove to be an excellent test of the scripting API as much as anything else.

well, how about a compromise --> import/export scripts that can be plugged into the file menu.

gui integration of python scripts is a big issue, as the best way to promote a user friendly interaction system is to make the code invisible to the average user. if plugins can be designed to load immediately running, or plug straight into the GUI somewhere, rather than the user having to ALT+P, blender would appear much more seamless.

I agree with beatabix. In the past a lot of functionality seemed to depend on this or that (particular Python version fi) and, as we see today, never got addressed. Import/ export is such a critical area that IMHO it should be integral to Blender. I think this is where inferior programs such as Milkshape (no disrespect intended) end up winning much more support than Blender (and money) because they got their priorities right from the start, ie, make it easy to get various fornats into and out of the program and only then add other functionality. So there should be a plug-in API that can work independant of any scripting.

Probably the next big thing we need to get hammered out is a
small api for import/export scripts.

Something like every import/export script should have
load_scene(filename,args) # load your pov or 3ds or whatever
save_scene(filename,args) # save your pov or 3ds or whatever
call_gui(args) # generic function to call the gui to adjust paramters.
args would probably be an array of values you can pass.

or something similar.
Then we could write a small function that looks in a predefined
directory for files with these functions and adds them to a menu
in the gui. Assuming we did this it would also make it alot easyer
to write a function to auto update import/export plugins and what not.

As ton stated I'm guessing the blender league already did some of this, if so it'd be great if someone from their posted what they have so people could get started on the plugins side of things.